Clif

When I got word that Clif Garboden had died, I suppose it was natural that, as a writer, I immediately thought of my favorite thing he wrote during the several years I worked with him. It was a full page of band names he'd thought up. I thought it was brilliant. When I first opened to it in that issue, I read the whole thing twice through in full before ever lifting my eyes from the page.

I still think it's brilliant, although on screen it lacks the punch of seeing it in the paper. A print-edition publication has finite space; holding it, you feel a value in each precious column-inch. On a web site, land is cheap and plentiful, so you expect writers to be sprawling their every passing thought across it. But in a newspaper... this was like taking a downtown acre away from the big developers, and setting it aside for street performers. A whole page in the feature well, just a list of goddamn band names he'd thought up. And it worked. Fuckin' A.

Anyway, this week's issue has tributes to Clif from people who knew him far better than I did; this post is mainly to point you to those pages. Here is editor-in-chief Peter Kadzis's obit; I'll add other links as I can.